For me, it was Flight Simulator 98. Although my very first flight simulator was Pro Pilot. That will always hold a special place in my heart. The intro was epic:
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FS4 on an Intel 386 cpu, an 80MB hard drive, and rocking an impressive 4MB (yep, MB, not GB, and it was expensive) of RAM.
The sim has come a looooooooong way!
Flight Simulator 98
I found this game in a bargain bin and ran my student computer into the ground trying to run it.
combat flight simulator 3
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FS2000 Professional was my first one of the franchise and since I had them all but CFS1.
FS2000 Professionalā FS2002 āCFS3 ā FS2004 ā FSX + Acceleration ā CFS2 (for a bargain) ā Microsoft Flight ā MSFS ā MSFS24.
Before that I started with Flight Unlimited II the whole flight simulation thing as a kid and also (later) tried the original Flight Unlimited. In between FSX and MSFS I also went to X-Plane 10 and 11.
Yeah, I used many different simulations. Still Flight Unlimited II has some special place in my heart. Back then (1997!) it already used aerial images to cover the whole SF bay area, had a working ATC system including emergency callouts as well as ai traffic and was quite realistic including a visual damage system.
This is what that thing looked like for all of you who donāt know about it 
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MSFs1, 1984, on a V20 pc. Endless nights looking at the empty world outside Meigs Fieldā¦
But I remember with nostalgia the first ever structured flight sim: Flight Assignment: A.T.P. and its ATC named George. It was 1990 and no AI.
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FS4 in the mid 90ās. Have had every version since.
FS98 then around the same time, microsoft combat flight simulator 1; and a year or so before those, flight unlimited 2 by looking glass studios that came bundled with a new PC.
Same for me! Trying to find some airportsā¦!1
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Sometime in the '80s, but the most fun was in the early '90s. I knew an airline pilot who flew international. He gave me his obsolete charts. Ran my flights using them. At his suggestion I tried flying into Hong Kong and Switzerland. Never failed to crash. There was a Swiss airport where you had to drop in over the mountains. Hong Kong was almost suicidal.
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Hi,
My first Flightsimulator was FS 95, quickly followed by FS 98. Then FS 2000, 2002, 2004 and FSX, which was unplayable with my computer at the time.
Switched to XP 10 and XP 11 until the event of MSFS 2020.
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Sublogic Flight Simulator II on my Amiga 1000! I was 16 circa 1987 and I felt like I just got a supercomputer for my very own enjoyment!!!
Whenever I get annoyed at the state of MSFS I try to remind myself of the magic of the new tech! Sometimes that makes up for the bugs and very bad choices in interface design and the like. MSFS is an absolutely amazing technological miracle sprinkled with a variety of nuggets of sheer stupidity. They can build a gorgeously lit amazing approximation of the entire planet to fly in, BUT THEY CANāT GIVE US REASONABLE WAYS TO ORGANIZE THE AIRCRAFT IN OUR HANGERS!!! OR DEFAULT TO A PARTICULAR WEATHER OR THE LAST WEATHER WE SELECTED?
Anyways, I digress. I sure had fun with those limited polygons back in the day!
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MSFS 5.0 for DOS. And later I checked versions 3 and 4. They had aircraft carriers and in version the 4 Aircraft Designer Module and other modules.
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I wonder, is this possible to create a module for FS2024 imitating features of the original Flight Unlimited? There was an excellent aerobatic school.
FS 2000 back in 1999 followed by the original CFS a few days later.
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Whenever the system opens up for third parties (which as per SDK I donāt think it is currently, but iirc Jƶrg told itās on the long to-do list to open it up) that should at least be possible 
Whichever was before 95, as I remember 95 being a huge deal for me getting a new Pentium, and using the CH for the new NASCAR Racing. Think I paid almost $300 for ONE extra MB of vram.
If it counts the sublogic Flight Simulator II on the Commodore C-64.
The first proper MS Flight Simulator was Flight Simulator 2004 (aka FS9) on PC. That was the first one that had good enough terrain to get me interested in a civilian Flight Simulator again, especially with the FS Global Terrain Mesh.
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Hi, I ran the first flight simulator, it was not Microsoft back in the day, 1982, on a Franklin Apple II plus clone, amber monochrome monitor from a 5 1/4" floppy disk. That happened to be the very first software program that I ever bought. It was amazing!
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I think we need to explain to most people here what that was like back then. I started with Flight II and have used every Microsoft Flight Simulator since then (back then it was still SubLogic).
The whole thing ran on a C64. For comparison: Every single one of your PCs is faster than all the C64s ever built combined ā and itās the most built computer in the world.
The graphics: 320x200 pixels at 16 colors ā you call it bricks, we called it high resolution. There was also sound ā well, it sounded like a drunken lawnmower.
There where no CTD back then because there was no desktop. Multiplayer meant sitting in front of the computer with your friends. The scenery ā green at the bottom and blue at the top. A few lines ā oh, thatās supposed to be the runway. And donāt forget the mountainsā¦ The fpsā¦ well, my grandfather managed to create faster slideshows while he was sleeping.
Butā¦ it was pure joy!
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